Not exactly Bing 2.0: Latest 'Visual Search' feature fails to impress
Last week, in what was probably an intentional promotional ploy, Microsoft showed off to some of its 40,000 employees and close colleagues, during an employee rally at Seattle's Safeco Field, some features of what it was touting as "Bing 2.0," with a warning that users everywhere could start to see these features go live as soon as today. While there is no official word of a "Bing 2.0" launch, one new feature has gone live today, and not quietly -- its curtain was officially raised during a ceremony at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco today.
Visual Search is being described as a way to search for items by sight instead of by text. Shoppers will be able to locate digital cameras, for example, says Microsoft, by way of "an engaging visual experience without having to sort through page after page of links."
Google's next search engine: What's the difference?
Yesterday, without much explanation or instructions, Google opened the floodgates on what it's describing as the next generation of its search engine, most likely to test its efficiency and performance using real-world traffic. Testers are being invited to sample the new engine that Google is calling "Caffeine," although perhaps intentionally, it isn't yet explaining just what the differences are.
In Betanews' initial tests Tuesday morning comparing Caffeine to Google's current stable release, we noticed that for nearly every simple and complex search query we tried, the top three non-paid search results were always the same. But the order of results starting as high as #4, sometimes #6, changed. Usually Caffeine retrieved the same pages as the stable version, but shuffled them in a different order.
Sherpa helps Android users find their way in foreign cities
Though the news actually leaked out a bit early in the "AppPack" at the end of July, Geodelic's location-based Android app called Sherpa was officially launched yesterday for all Android users.
Sherpa combines "Web 2.0"-style profiling with location-based and contextual data to suggest nearby attractions, restaurants and retailers. Using a learning engine called GENIE (Geodelic ENgine for Interest Evaluation), Sherpa automatically learns a user's favorite locations and lifestyle behavior. If a user eats out more than shops, it modifies itself and tailors the experience to begin showing more restaurants and less retail stores. Sherpa will also only give suggestions that are pertinent to the time of day, so if you run a search at 2:00 am looking for government offices, you're not likely get anything without searching specifically.
Barnes & Noble launches its own e-bookstore
It's an odd time to launch an e-bookstore, in the wake of Amazon's Orwellian book-deletion shenanigans as we are, but Barnes & Noble is jumping in with both feet. The new Barnes & Noble eBookstore launched Monday with over 700,000 titles, leapfrogging it past Amazon's efforts.
The store allows downloads to readers for the iPhone/iPod Touch and the BlackBerry, along with Windows and Mac machines; whatever the reader, it's optimized to the .pdb and .prc file formats. (The readers are free and come with free books -- including, if you register, a Merriam-Webster dictionary, plus access to half a million public-domain books from Google.)
Yahoo Search Pad vs. Google Squared Showdown: History in the making
Online search engines have proven themselves a boon to topical research... and to sticky-note sales, when you finally hit the mother lode of great sites you want to remember without condemning them to the unfiltered pond that is your bookmarks list. Yahoo on Tuesday released Search Pad, a search companion meant to snip, store and annotate useful items; Google Labs last month unveiled Google Squared, which also aims to help parse and organize online information.
Yahoo Search Pad, a close spiritual relative to Yahoo's 2005-era "My Web" search-saving tool, entered beta back in February. It's designed to stand by while you search on that site and, when it detects that you're following a train of thought, to keep track of the sites you find.
Go west, young man...rerouting...Make a legal U-turn, young man
On Independence Day weekend, I was faced with a fourteen-hour drive and a long outdated, standalone GPS unit. The Garmin Nuvi GPS that I received as a gift two Christmases prior had begun to prompt me to pay for a map update every time I started it up. Consequently, I didn't use it very much, and stuck to using Telenav Navigator or Google Maps on my phone in the frequent instances when I have become truly, hopelessly lost.
As we were packing up the car, I started to wonder just how necessary the Garmin's map update actually would be. I mean, how often do roads really change, right? Presuming the poles of the Earth don't suddenly reverse, an outdated GPS is at least going to give you useful map coordinates and tell you what direction you're driving.
Myka's Linux-based BitTorrent box great home theater PC for lazy people
With as many set-top boxes as there suddenly appear to be in the home video market, as long as any one of them has a strong central feature, it could be the one that becomes a household name. Look at TiVo, Slingbox, and AppleTV: Each of these built a TV-based ecosystem around a single unique feature: TiVo's was the DVR, Slingbox was the place-shifting concept, and AppleTV was iTunes.
Now, IPTV startup Myka has designed its own media center STB, focusing on BitTorrent as its winning central feature. And while it doesn't carry all the functions one would expect in a home theater PC (HTPC), it offers enough power and functionality to be considered a little more than your run-of-the-mill set top box. Like the title says, if you're a little bit lazy...you could even consider Myka a pre-built HTPC. Betanews got an exclusive look at this new device.
TweetPsych wants to get inside your head
We spent some enjoyable time earlier this week playing with TweetPsych, a site that puts linguistic analysis algorithms to work figuring out just what's with the most compulsive Twitter users out there. Currently in beta, the for-entertainment-only analysis still provided us with some amusing insight into Twitter talk -- and into the brains of three Betanews staffers.
The site, developed by Dan Zarrella of HubSpot (home of the addictive Twitter Grader), builds a "psychological profile" of a given Twitter user based on his or her last 1,000 tweets by running the text against two algorithms that look not at what topics people are talking about but at the cognitive processes they seem to be using. The RID (Regressive Imagery dictionary) algorithm sifts texts for their primary (free-form, associative, creative), secondary (logical, problem-solving), and emotional content, while the LIWC (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) algorithm matches words against 82 language categories that can roughly estimate the writer's mindset. The LIWC is a widely used linguistics database; the RID is less so.
The first 15 days: Is the Palm Pre better than Sprint is bad?
If there was a more remarkable idea circulating in the gadget-head community back in January than Palm's got a scorching-hot new phone on the way, it was, "And they chose Sprint as the launch partner".
Seriously, Sprint? Necessary only-major-mobile-provider-in-the-heartland evil to tens of thousands of mobile-phone users? Whatever Dan Hesse was saying about customer service in those moodily lit black-and-white commercials, the prospect of putting Sprint in charge of selling the odd, pretty, pricey little Palm Pre was wince-inducing.
Collecta vs. Google in real-time search matchup
If you have a completely new search engine -- in other words, one that's not a renamed version of Windows Live Search -- you need to give it a niche that somehow emphasizes the quality of its results compared to those from Google. Wolfram Alpha's niche of choice is the intelligence of its results, in an effort to wring the educational power out of the verbal sponge that is the Internet. So that slot's taken for now.
Enter Collecta, the product of former AOL search chief Gerry Campbell, and an indicator of what AOL could have accomplished had its previous leadership chosen to invest in ingenuity. Launched last Thursday in public beta, the ideal of Collecta is that it searches content that tends to be updated quickly and frequently, and that it conducts those searches on the fly -- it's truly searching for what you've asked it to search for, rather than look up results from a massive index.
Palm Pre: Rounding up (or down) the reviews
It's on, and most of the outlets we've seen so far compared Palm's new phone to -- what else? -- the iPhone. To summarize:
Pre beats iPhone: Associated Press, USA Today, TG Daily
Opera 10 beta sports a new look, 23% boosted performance
Download Opera 10 for Windows Build 1551 Beta 1 from Fileforum now.
The developers at Opera Software have been publicly working with version 2.2 of the Presto rendering engine for its premier Web browser since last December. Their goal has been to implement Web fonts for Scalable Vector Graphics without sacrificing performance or other standards support. Conceivably, this could allow sites to deploy both TrueType and SVG fonts in user-scalable sizes scaled to fit the current window size, as this recent Opera test pattern demonstrates. (Right now, Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 supports some scalable TrueType, but not to the degree that Opera does.)
Google Chrome 3: Incremental changes along the road to Extensions
Download Google Chrome 3.0.182.2 Beta for Windows from Fileforum now.
It has been hard to tell, since Google pulled the "beta" flag from its Chrome browser back in December, where we are in that software's development process. So, clarifying for all the good folks in Fileforum: Welcome to 3.0.182.2, the current version of the browser not to be found in the stable download channel. Remember that Google is the first to say they "don't give to much weight to version numbers," and enjoy the latest rev for what it is: A few fixes, a few tweaks, and a lot of anticipation for Extensions, coming soon to a How-Did-I-Live-Without-This? near you.
A look at Eeebuntu Base 3.0
Download Eeebuntu Base Edition 3.0 from Fileforum now.
Eeebuntu is a custom Ubuntu distro optimized for use on Asus' Eee PC line of netbooks. By incorporating Ubuntu with the Array Kernel and EeeConfigure, Eeebuntu eliminates much of the massaging Ubuntu would require to fully work on Asus' popular netbook.
The Sidekick LX 2009: smart phone or smarter netbook?
Decades from now, when our descendants' implanted heads-up displays are implanted in their heads, and their instant messages and points-of-presence (phone service? what's that?) are controlled directly by their brainwaves, they'll look back on all of us who painstakingly suffered through the smartphone era, wondering how we managed to get so worked up over hunks of silicon and plastic. And I, very old by then and loudly eccentric, will shake my bony fists and yell at the whippersnappers:
"BECAUSE SOME OF THEM WERE FUN, DAMMIT! NOW GET OFF MY LAWN!"
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